what is the best anti virus?

Quote from TheEvi1 : I believe Symantec released some statistics last year showing that religious sites actually carried more threats than porn sites now.

Never believe anything from Symantec.
They're full of baloney.
Amongst the techies I know, it's not even considered to be an AV company, but rather a marketing company that pushes its way into end user machines and plays the "George Bush" terror game with the client, to keep him so terrified that he wouldn't dare ever remove the good for nothing AV program, which, btw, gobbles up power more than any other AV program known to man, and it's probably the least efficient too.
Taking advice from Symantec would be like getting your stock tips from a street bum.

OP

If you just want to scan your system I like hitman pro free to try

http://www.surfright.nl/en/hitmanpro/

Superantispyware is also pretty quick

http://www.superantispyware.com/download.html

Also run disk cleanup and remove all your temp files before running a scan

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-U...sk-Cleanup

Asking "Who makes the best AV?" is sort of like asking "Who makes the best pizza?"

You're going to get a ton of different answers because everyone has preferences and there's no real scientific way to test them. Don't believe the "pros" that tell you they have the testing down to a science either.

Quote from RockySosua : Never believe anything from Symantec. They're full of baloney. Amongst the techies I know, it's not even considered to be an AV company, but rather a marketing company that pushes its way into end user machines and plays the "George Bush" terror game with the client, to keep him so terrified that he wouldn't dare ever remove the good for nothing AV program, which, btw, gobbles up power more than any other AV program known to man, and it's probably the least efficient too. Taking advice from Symantec would be like getting your stock tips from a street bum.

You talking about Norton or Symantec? Norton's always been the hog but the symantec corp editions were actually pretty lite on resources and has a pretty powerful list of definitions .

I don't know much about the company, but I do believe they discovered stuxnet when no other company did. That's probably just one of many.

avg slows down your computer try microsoft security essentials but it misses some spyware and scarewear

Quote from dickbigger : avg slows down your computer try microsoft security essentials but it misses some spyware and scarewear

If that's the impression you get, then you're not installing AVG properly.
You must NOT accept all the options, in fact, accept none.
I have done tons of testing, to determine the lightest of the good free AV programs, which includes MSE, but AVG and Avira are both substantially lighter than MSE.
MSE is by no means a heavy AV program. It's just not as light as AVG.

Whats missing in this post is the distinction between a virus, malware, adware etc. The lines are pretty blurred as to the difference in each.
Also, I like Malwarebytes Pro, mainly for its ability to block what it perceives as a malicious site. I have run across a few false positives that it will block, but I would rather have that than view a webpage that has some infected drive by ads on them.

I would also like to hear what people think about Defender in Windows 8.

Quote from repitall : Whats missing in this post is the distinction between a virus, malware, adware etc. The lines are pretty blurred as to the difference in each. Also, I like Malwarebytes Pro, mainly for its ability to block what it perceives as a malicious site. I have run across a few false positives that it will block, but I would rather have that than view a webpage that has some infected drive by ads on them. I would also like to hear what people think about Defender in Windows 8.

Nothing's really missing or blurred. The OP asked about antivirus and that's what we've been responding to him about.

Generally speaking it's a good idea to have a proactive Antivirus software running at all times but not necessary to have an antimalware running at all times. I run antivirus and only run antimalware programs if I think I may have an issue. Avast in particular is great at blocking web attacks just like a malware program would.

I like to say that Antivirus finds most viruses and some spyware, and Antimalware finds most spyware and some viruses. A good idea to have both, but only necessary to have antivirus running always.

As far as performance goes Avast, AVG, and Microsoft usually always score in the top ten. Avast (of the freebies) is in the lead most of the time. I believe however it's really dependent upon your machine specifications and the types of files you store on your machine.

Quote from redmaxx : "Who makes the best pizza?"

I've been making my own pizza for several months now. It absolutely blows away any fast food pizza, hands down. Any time I feed my pizza to friends or family, people are quick to comment about how much better it is than any of the offerings in the surrounding area.

Seriously not a lot to it. I recommend looking at a basic French bread and going from there.

Quote from kakomu : I've been making my own pizza for several months now. It absolutely blows away any fast food pizza, hands down. Any time I feed my pizza to friends or family, people are quick to comment about how much better it is than any of the offerings in the surrounding area. Seriously not a lot to it. I recommend looking at a basic French bread and going from there.

Do you make antivirus too? Because if you do...

Mse ftw

Quote from RockySosua : Never believe anything from Symantec. They're full of baloney. Amongst the techies I know, it's not even considered to be an AV company, but rather a marketing company that pushes its way into end user machines and plays the "George Bush" terror game with the client, to keep him so terrified that he wouldn't dare ever remove the good for nothing AV program, which, btw, gobbles up power more than any other AV program known to man, and it's probably the least efficient too. Taking advice from Symantec would be like getting your stock tips from a street bum.

Quote from Aitrus : You talking about Norton or Symantec? Norton's always been the hog but the symantec corp editions were actually pretty lite on resources and has a pretty powerful list of definitions .

I used to loathe Norton. Bloatware. Nagware. Pain in the royal ass to remove from your system.

Nowadays, it's amongst my favorite of the paid proggies. Within the past few years, I've had BitDefender, Kaspersky and Norton. Of those three, Norton seemed to be the lightest on resources (computer booted more quickly, browsers launched faster, webpages loaded faster) and caught more things (I got a bug with both BitDefender and Kaspersky).

Poor OP, you guys scared him off. He had no idea what you are talking about.

Quote from Lavin : Poor OP, you guys scared him off. He had no idea what you are talking about.

Mmm... pizza....

Reading this thread got me hungry!